The areas of pharmaceutical and biopharmaceutical research and development with respect to business development and licensing is very complex, and making any decisions as to what drugs or disease targets to research and/or develop, or what companies to partner with or enter into licensing or research agreements with requires sifting through and organizing large amounts of data, including unstructured data and often unrelated data. The problem faced by corporations engaged in pharmaceutical research and development is the daunting task of processing and making use of the immense and growing data sources available to make intelligent business decisions. Pharmaceutical corporations are also faced with the problem of identifying development, partnership, and acquisition opportunities before their competitors act on such opportunities. This process requires constant mining of scientific and financial information and assessment of this information against internal knowledge. There is currently no single place for this information to be searched, analyzed and processed.
A number of data products and services provide different sources of information that can be used in making business development and licensing decisions for a pharmaceutical company, however, these sources are disconnected and there is, at present, no easy way for a company to effectively utilize the disparate data sources in making effective business decisions. Furthermore, even if a company does sort through these different data sources, there does not exist an effective way to visually represent the collected data in a way that will aid in business development and licensing decisions.
Several companies and organizations exist that provide information (some of which may be publicly available or by subscription) that could be used by a pharmaceutical company in making business development and licensing decisions. Such entities and resources include many products, examples of which are Informa's Citeline (e.g., Pharma Projects, Medtrack, and Trial Trove), Adis, GlobalData, EvaluatePharma, PharmaVentures, Datamonitor, Venture Source, Deloitte Recap, and research journals such as PubMed and Medline. These and other resources are available to pharmaceutical companies wishing to research information to be used in making product development, acquisition, and licensing decisions. These data resource companies and services gather information from similar data sources and each provide their own features for searching and utilizing the data. However, none of these services provides a single source for searching both scientific and financial resources and for presenting the collected data in a manner that will enable a user to make effective business decisions.
In addition to information assets that pharmaceutical companies can utilize, there are software tools, such as Relay and Inova, and consulting firms that help companies identify and prioritize opportunities. Also available are “big data” solutions that mine unstructured data and present it in visual analytics tools. However, none of these solutions meets the industry need of a visual, analytical tool that uses intelligence to assist in decision making.
What is needed is a visual tool that uses a combination of scientific and financial intelligence, alongside internal corporate intelligence, to find whitespace or opportunities in the landscape of product development, potential acquisition, and partnership deals. Also, a system is needed that can process such information to identify and display patterns and trends that can be used in making effective business decisions.